This mani is a bit of nail art, some swatching, and a small amount of comparison. When Zoya did their New Years sale, I bought 4 new polishes that I intended to replace some terrible polishes that I own, and to fill a few gaps. This is the first of them!

What you see here are three thin coats of Jordan. I bought this polish to replaced Tickled Pink by Wet n’ Wild which takes 4 coats and is incredibly thick. I wanted to compare the two, so I put Tickled Pink on my ring finger, and Jordan on all the others. I cannot tell the difference! Which is to say that the swatches of Jordan online are accurate. I was hoping Jordan would be a two-coater, but for a pastel 3 isn’t terrible. This is just a nice pastel pink creme. No frills.

I then added a gradient, and stamped a tiny pink heart near my cuticle. Super easy, but quite pretty! I do wish I had started the gradient a biiit close to my free edge, but it still looks nice! It was a really quite fitting manicure to wear right before Valentine’s day…so I hope you guys all have a great (and chocolate-filled) tomorrow!

To me, this ended up looking a bit like a red-and-black topographical map, ergo the title!

I don’t have much to say about this…my nails were short, I wanted to use Blaze by Zoya, and this stamp looked interesting. Blaze always ALWAYS goes on darker than I think it will! I still like the polish, but I don’t know how frequently I am going to keep wearing it, I have other prettier burgundies (and Zoya just isn’t the best at scattered holos).

Day 8’s prompt is ‘metallic’ which is an odd one. I ended up using a metallic flakie/holo polish as the base for this mani, so I’m posting it here!

The actual reason for this mani was the stamps…I’ve been wanting to use the optical illusions from this particular plate for a year (which is how long I’ve owned the plate). I love how it came out! I am also quite glad I did not use a simple white base as I had initially planned. That would have been boring :-p

I don’t have much else to say about them, since they are simply stamps. I do now want to go use all the other fun designs from this plate! I’ve used some of them before, but I actually like how good this looks with just a simple stamp (being me, its usually over a gradient).

COLOR. Oh my gosh you guys I AM SO EXCITED. I wore these when I went to San Francisco for my first vacation after hospital time! Also for my birthday :-p

I was trying to recreate a gradient from ilaeti but I think I need more blue! I love how the colors came out though, so I imagine I will be trying again…and this time showing a gradient-only photo, it was so pretty! Don’t get me wrong, I like the stamping, but that gradient.

I wish my nails were longer, the hint of neon green you can see at the tip of my thumb made me happy.

Colors:

~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White

~ Blue: Zoya – Rocky

~ Purple: Sephora X – Ignition

~ Pink: WOW – #371

~ Yellow: Love & Beauty – Yellow

~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

~ Stamp: B Loves Plates – 03 Mind Blown

That’s all! More colors and fun designs next week. I am so happy I had a least a month to wear whatever I wanted on my nails! Residency is going to be painful if I need to keep my nails ‘tame’. Although I have a sneaking suspicion that I won’t have time for nail art, just color and a stamp if I’m lucky. I don’t know whats going to happen to the blog next year. Yikes…

Do-do-DO-do….*cue creepy music*. This was a super fun mani to put together! My nails are unfortunately short, but I wanted to do something twisty and strange (and purple). Voila!

I’ve been doing quite a bit of double-stamping or two-design-on-one-mani stamping recently. I don’t know why…its almost like a single design isn’t challenging enough? Which is unfortunate since I don’t have much time to paint my nails anymore!

I know some people don’t consider purple a halloween color, but I totally do.

Another week of chrome-based manis. Today’s is the simplest, but also rather cute! My nails were still short from being in the hospital, but I picked up a new glitter topper polish and I wanted to play with it!

Frosted Cupcake by whim (which I got at ULTA) is a mix of variously sized white matte glitters and holo glitters. It is somewhat sparse, but easy to work with. The bottle is smaller than usual, and usually costs wayyyy too much money (by my standards) but I got this for $2 so I consider it worth it! The clearance section at ULTA is my best friend.

I thought Frosted Cupcake would make a decent star-base for a galaxy mani, and somehow turned that into going through a warp zone? At least, that is what I was going for. The awesomely dizzying nested squares from a stamp on B Loves Plates 03 caught my eye and I just had to try it! I maybe should have added a bit more of a galaxy-like feel rather than just using a blue metallic polish as my base, but it was late at night and I wanted to see how much glitter Frosted Cupcake had. Voila!

Despite how quick and easy this mani was (polish, glitter topper, stamp, done!), I still think it looks pretty cool! I tried to center the stamps on each nail around a central empty spot or glitter piece in particular, I don’t know why. It worked out in the end!

Happy 4th of July! Have some patriotic and sparkly nail art. I also have no excuse for why I am posting this so late…I forgot it was a Monday and thus didn’t post when I woke up!

This design was inspired by chickettes although she used gel polish, which is totally cheating! Which is also to say that I’m sure mine took longer than hers to dry.

As it turns out, I have the same stamp she used, but it doesn’t work super well. Since I already knew this (I’ve tried using it before), I turned instead to one of the awesome stamps on B Loves Plate plate 03, Mind Blown. I also grabbed some tiny stars off Bundle Monster plate 307, because despite all my myriad stamping plates I have none with stars on them!

Despite the wonderful fireworks slated for tonight, I need to get to sleep early…I start on my surgery rotation tomorrow. This also means that, tragically, I just cut my nails to little tiny nubbins…and left the poor things bare. No nail polish in the surgical suite! As a reminder from here on out until September, all the posts will be scheduled rather than posted when I wake up in the morning (because I will likely forget at 4am, which is my very saddening wake-up time for surgery). The posts should continue through my return on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, assuming I’ve timed everything right. Happy July, and I’ll see you guys in a few months!

I don’t even know. I was trying something and it looked boring so I added some more and then some glitter…and somehow we ended up here.

My first mistake was using a coral. I love the look of my coral polishes…I just don’t like how they look on ME! Oops. I knew there was a reason I never wore them. Then I made some black and white stamping decals and cut them into strips. The strips looked ok.

Then I added another thinner set of strips. But now it looked weird again. So I added some gold glitter dots. And this is just too much. I kinda hate it and kinda don’t mind it. Yay…?

My nails are so tiny! And so sad. I went to New York City this past weekend to hang out with some friends, and in the process slightly broke two nails and completely devastated a third. I cut both of my hands down…but you can still see the devastation on my pointer finger here. It ripped halfway down into my nail bed 😦

Despite this terrible tear (which I am going to attempt to patch up and grow out, if I can), this mani came out quite cute! I had been looking at this diamond pattern on B. Loves Plates plate 03, but it was a tilted diamond…however, since my nails are so short I was able to apply it vertically!

The stamp has two colors on it, a lighter blue in the middle and a darker blue on either side. I thought it was rather fun!

Hope you enjoyed, despite my nubbins, and wish me luck growing out my poor destroyed pointer!! (Also to note – this is the first post that actually survived the great save failure that you guys will be reading about shortly. Yay! I am posting super out-of-order)

I jazzed up an earlier manicure! My silver spiral staircase mani from a few weeks ago was a rushed job, but I had something in mind when I did it! So, this is the ‘full’ version of that mani (aka I went back the next night and added more things).

Luckily, the original design was 100% dry when I went to add color and gemstones, which does tend to happen when you sleep on it! I colored in the whole nail with one coat of a thin jelly teal, and then put a second (maybe even third, I actually don’t remember) over alternating spirals for contrast. Jelly polishes = awesome fun! I need more.

I went ahead and added an AB-coated crystal stone for even more glittery goodness. Luckily, my nails were long enough to actually get a bit of the spiral-like appearance from this stamp!

I might have messed this up a teeny tiny bit. But it still looks awesome!

This was yet another “Eva plays with awesome stamps that can finally be centered, yay!” only I accidentally reversed the one on my pointer finger. It’s still centered…just upside-down. Oops!

In my defense, my lovely boyfriend and a friend of ours were downstairs making me cookies (yay!) but kept yelling about spilling melted butter all over the microwave, dropping milk, creating giant monster blobs of cookie dough…I was getting a bit nervous about the state and survival of our (admittedly tiny and sad) kitchen. So I messed up a stamp.

I got 5 hours of sleep last night but I NEEDED to change my nails, so I had to do something fast and easy! Ergo, we have a gold-on-black stamped design.

I know this is simple, but the stamp is awesome so hopefully that makes up for it a little bit! The black is Sinful Colors Black on Black, and the gold is Essie Good as Gold.

The stamp is from B Loves Plates 03, Mind-blowing. I know that my clear stamper is also a B Loves product, but the stamps on this plate pick up soo perfectly! Look at how lined up those starbursts are… 🙂

I did double stamp my pointer (I missed a spot) and you can tell, but its a close thing.

This mani was so easy! Which is not a thing I would usually say. It also looks awesome.

I used one coat of black creme polish (Sinful Colors – Black on Black) covered with two coats of a multichrome glitter (piCture pOlish – Aurora). I added top coat just to speed things up. I still and always will love Aurora, she’s so pretty!

The base colors were dry, I grabbed my newest black (which is to say my “wettest” black…my normal stamping black didn’t work at all. This super squishy clear stamper needs very wet polish to pick up properly!) which is why the stamp is not quite as dark as it could be. Regardless, I used my new B.03 plate from B. Loves Plates, which is full of eye-illusions and I know I will be using a LOT of, and picked a stamp.

I then used my crystal clear stamper (also from B Loves Plates) and went to town. Look at how parallel my lines are to my nail tip! And how ALL OF THE NAIL IS COVERED.

What I have learned: squishy stampers (like this new one) operate differently than hard stampers (my old one). You don’t have to push down to pick up an image, although you do still have to roll the stamper. You need to pick up the image faster, but have a slightly longer time to position and place the stamp before the polish dries and is unusable. Squishy stampers actually cover your entire nail all the way to the edge without issue. Magic!

Hope you enjoyed! And sorry-not-sorry for the photo spam, I do love multichromes!

This is a really simple looking mani, because I had a new toy to play with and I wanted to see how it worked! My “crystal clear stamper” from B. Loves Plates finally arrived! It took one month and one day from when I ordered it, which is a pain, but it was shipping from Poland so I am not totally surprised!

I basically wanted to see if I could get the clear stamper to work. I started using a different plate with thin lines…and it failed completely. However, that is a plate that I had trouble getting to work even with the stamper I am used to (a harder non-clear one. A very very hard one, as it turns out). So, I switched to a plate that had worked for me before, grabbed my favorite stamping polish, and tried it again. Voila!

I’m sure you guys have been seeing reviews of these clear stampers all over the place, but I figured it can’t hurt to get some more advice. I got the stamper to work, but it took some messing around first.

1. Prime the stamper. I don’t know if this was necessary, but I cleaned my stamper with a Mr Clean Magic Eraser before I used it, because it was shiny and not picking up the stamp (although that might have just been the faulty plate, I have no way of knowing!)
2. Make sure the stamper is clean by using tape to stick off any dust.
3. Squishy stampers (like this) are different from hard stampers (like konad). You need to move FAST between putting down the polish and picking it up onto the stamper. You also need to use fresh/wet polish, rather than dried up polish or it won’t pick up. However, you get longer with the polish on the stamper before it dries and is unusable.
4. The only method that works to get the polish onto the stamper is a GENTLE roll. I kept squishing down and the image wouldn’t transfer, or would get all distorted! As long as the polish is wet, it takes VERY little pressure to get the image to transfer.
5. Just squish it onto your nail! You can do a bit of a rolling motion, but it is hardly necessary. The squishy factor means the head of the stamper bends around your nail bed. It’s wonderful.

I had been debating for months getting a rectangular stamper so I could have more control on how I positioned my stamps, or at the very least one of those super-squishy stamper since my hard one was difficult to work with. I am glad I waited, clear stampers are so cool! And my stamps are basically perfectly positioned. With minimal effort.

Anyway, my nail shape is weird right now (I broke a nail but wanted to test the clear stamper anyway, so I just re-shaped my nails rather than file them down. This shape is likely to last only briefly, I prefer square nails!), so sorry! The two colors here are No Worries by Glitter Gal and Good as Gold by Essie. The stamp is EdM plate 22. Enjoy!